Last Wednesday, Ms. Arnold’s 6th grade class had the pleasure of visiting Oregon Ridge Nature Center. The class is currently studying geology and mineralogy, and Oregon Ridge has a wonderful hand-on program about identifying the rocks and minerals of our local Piedmont watershed. The tour also incorporated landscape reading skills as we examined the landscape in relationship to its historical use. Please enjoy the photos below of our trip. Oregon Ridge is a mere 15 minute drive from WSB. Make it a point to visit this wonderful site. They offer an amazing array of nature programing that are open to the public. (And many of which are free!)

Hello! Due to the intensity of yesterday’s (much needed) deluge, I am hereby issuing a RAIN CHECK on our garden party until tomorrow (Thursday 8/13). Same time: 12pm-1:30pm.
Hope to see you then!

To stay up-to-date regarding this event check out our facebook feed: http://www.facebook.com/WaldorfSchoolBaltimore

Last week, WSB’s 4th & 5th grade classes camped together on Wye Island for 3 days. The island is located in the tidal recesses of the Chesapeake Bay. During the trip our students fully immerse themselves within Maryland’s complex ecosystem. Despite the rain (and between the s’mores), our days were packed with activities. . . . We took numerous nature hikes (one to a 300 year old holly tree), canoed in the Wye River, did a service project for the Department of Natural Resources, had a visit from Scales & Tails (a wild animal refuge project), and even sailed on a skipjack!
The week before our 8th grade class took a week-long camping trip to the Living Earth School in the Blue Ridge Mountains of central Virginia (see photos in our facebook album). WSB’s camping trips are an integral part of our curriculum because they bridge our students’ academic work with hands-on experience. These trips are so vitally important because they deepen our students’ love, respect, and understanding, of their relationship with the natural world. And it is through nurturing this internal wisdom to blossom within them that we are confident they will use their growing knowledge and power to heal the wounded planet they are inheriting, the act of which will be their generation’s greatest challenge and promise.
Please enjoy the following photos taken on the Wye Island trip:

Removing protection tubes from Maryland native trees.

Check out more photos of last year’s 5th grade class on a similar trip in 2013: https://sustainablewaldorf.com/2013/05/13/5th-grade-camping-trip-on-wye-island/

Greetings! As spring approaches you will see a lot of exciting new developments happening around our school. . . . First, we will be expanding the garden and adding a few more planting areas to allow all of our students the ability to get their hands in the earth and grow something beautiful (and/or tasty). The 1st graders have been actively helping the expansion process (as you can see in the photos below). We will also be setting up a small pop-up greenhouse within the next few days on the 2nd floor terrace (between the art and handwork rooms). This will allow us to have experiential lessons about the food cycle — from seed to table. Next fall, we will save our seeds in order to “close-the-loop” and make our garden more self-sufficient and teach our students that they don’t need to relay on  a store for everything. An herb spiral will be this year’s most interesting new garden feature (but I’ll save that for another post). Beyond expanding our gardening efforts, we plan to get the earthoven cleaned up and re-coated with a few new layers of clay… our hope is that we’ll be making pizzas (with some of our early blooming garden crops) by the end of the school year.

Below you will find photos of our 1st graders who are always eager to work in the garden during recess. . . .

And here is what some students thought up to do with the sod we digging up. . . .